


When We Had Gone Astray

by dorothy_notgale



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Anal Sex, Christmas, Great War, Intercrural Sex, Jealousy, M/M, Murder, Narrator is a sick puppy, Oral Sex, Perfect Gift, hatefuck, holiday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-05 22:50:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5393189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the chaos of the Great War, as the second Christmas Truce plays out along the lines, Narrator’s relationship with West is experiencing strain. Perhaps fetching a heartfelt present will help.<br/>Or, ‘Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee has gravely misunderstood the situation, and accidentally plays with fire while trying to roast chestnuts.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	When We Had Gone Astray

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SilverBird13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverBird13/gifts).



> This is all the fault of [SilverBird13](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverBird13/pseuds/SilverBird13), obviously.

“I must say, old boy, I didn’t think you the type to go in for this. Or is stepping out on your little ice queen part of the fun?” Flames stirred somewhere in my chest at the gibe, and I smiled secretively at the young knight–six years younger than I, with hair of ginger-bronze and verdigris eyes to match, fringed by thick lashes.

“Major–”

“Christian names, please, _Lieutenant_. I like to think of myself as a friend to the men under me,” he said, leer baring teeth white and regular as any I’ve seen in an anatomical drawing.

“Eric, then. As one gentleman to another, I’d prefer we not speak of Dr. West tonight.”

“Or _to_ him afterward, I’ll bet!”

“That too.” Clapham-Lee conversing with West following these proceedings would prove quite a feat, indeed.

“Where is he, anyway?” he asked, peering about as though expecting to see West pop out of a cupboard in our shared, makeshift quarters. All he found were a wardrobe, two narrow cots, and a washbasin and jug on a crack-mirrored vanity the size of a postage stamp–the inadequacy of which necessitated that we keep our shaving kits at the foot of my bed, atop the trunk containing my private possessions.

I shook my head and took another shallow sip of whiskey from a just-gifted flask (still bearing a red ribbon), then passed it back to its new owner, who lounged beside me crosswise on my narrow bed.

In point of fact, I did know–or could guess–my partner’s present occupation or lack thereof. He was wound as tightly as I, and for a far worthier cause. A recent, heartwarmingly seasonal dearth of usable bodies, topped by the afternoon’s chance plane crash from which nothing of the fit, intelligent aviator could be salvaged, had left him stinging and irritable, unspent energy racing under his skin. I could fairly see him, lurking in a specimenless laboratory. He’d be smoking both our month’s ration of tobacco and poring a thousand times over notes made useless without opportunities for hands-on application. Morbidness and despair would soon follow.

And here I was, spending my Christmas Eve in furtive revelry with a handsome officer.

The flush in the Major’s freckle-dusted cheeks owed as much to alcohol as it did to amusement or lust, and if my furnishing of spirits made him somewhat imprudent in speech and action, so much the better. I had known when I began of the Major’s susceptibility to the vice (among others), given the state in which I’d discovered him and West some weeks earlier.

It’s funny how often spilled claret necessitates the removal of a drinking companion’s waistcoat, tie, collar, and cuffs, but harms nothing else in the room.

The stains were no worse to clean than the blood they so resembled.

As he guzzled, I watched, feeling the triplet burning threads of booze, anger, and lust form a Gordian knot low in my belly. I would need my Alexander, my conqueror, to slice through it all.

It is not that I suspected my longtime partner of any tawdry _emotional_ entanglement; a decade’s close company had more than taught me how fruitless was the Major’s operation on that front. West’s beauty was, indeed, icy, his mind shining like pale sunlight on those Antarctic wastes which so entice and entrap the boldest and most foolish of men. Rather, it was the disrespect Clapham-Lee had shown to all parties in this matter that infuriated–especially since he remained so utterly convinced of his own desirability. If he failed in his pathetic ‘seduction’, so (ran his logic) must the flaw be in the man who rebuffed him or the obstacle posed by another, never himself. And thus, following the incident, his once-fawning flirtations turned to small-minded insult: jabs at a genius’ height, manhood, origins and habits. As though any of those mattered next to the man himself.

Worse, West continued to associate with the Major, in company and private, ignoring or missing the thinly-veiled petulance and continued pursuit in favor of pointlessly attempting to educate the dimwitted animal.

I told myself, then, that it was for his sake that I baited my hook with the only thing the wretch understood–flesh, live and breathing for him.

Our knees brushed, warm through wool, as he emptied the flask and tucked it into his jacket before tossing the lot onto West’s disused cot.

“So, shall we?” His kiss was graceless, moustache prickly and stiff with wax (all the way out here, and still well-supplied in the _necessities_ of life, our Major). But his body felt firm against mine, physique fit and sculpted from a leisurely pre-War life of sport and exercise. Polo; golf; rowing; dips in his club’s natatorium; cold-water baths and diets; tonics and rest cures; he had often regaled us with details galore of how he maintained a build which any of our labourer-patients back in Bolton could have been proud to achieve through honest toil. And indeed, from an aesthetic standpoint, it was something to admire. From an erotic one…

I had long ago accepted my Uranian inclinations as simple medical fact; living for so long with one who prompted them above all others necessitated such introspection. To be physically moved by a form as admittedly perfect as the Major’s, I concluded, should bring no inherent shame to any man so made. (So even would West agree, expert as he was in both human physiology and the arbitrariness of society’s rules for how one might use it.)

The psyche inhabiting that well-honed body, on the other hand, left much to be desired, well-bred intelligence and sensitivity long ago gone to seed. A waste of fine materials.

And if I happened to close my eyes during the kiss and dream that those materials were finer still… more delicately assembled, star-stuff or nephilim, cooler and sweeter than even the greatest ordinary man… whose business was it but mine anyway?

“Well, big boy,” he crowed, grasping my hot member through the garb of our adopted military, “You _are_ all advertized, aren’t you? How does our poppet even take this whanger?”

“Do be quiet, Maj- Eric.”

“Don’t like my lip, eh?” His sensuous mouth twitched into the sort of smile which said he’d never in his life questioned the world, nor his favored place within it. “I’ll wager I can change your mind there.” And with that, he unbuttoned my flies. I shoved his head down; blessed silence.

For all his faults, Clapham-Lee was not ungenerous–other inverts in the service had intimated, obliquely, his facility in this act, and he took to it happily, using hands as well as lips, tongue, and teeth on every part of my sex. Yet still, those faults…

“I don’t suppose Priss would ever bend his stiff neck to serve you French fashion, would he?”

He was wrong. He understood nothing of my man’s magnanimity.

The soft hair beneath my hand had been ironed and coiffed into homefront-fashionable ruddy waves, but with my eyes closed I could just imagine it as the disarray of an early morning or late night: those few occasional moonbeamed hours when flaxen perfection relaxed into something altogether more touchable.

My Love, my brilliant one, would forgive this transgression. He knew of my needs, and at times (I suspected) found them bothersome to accommodate–though when he did, I could imagine no finer bliss.

I pulled the Major up and away before creaming, tearing at his trousers with a near desperation which some part of my normal mind found humiliating. His meat, red and slippery, was hot in my hand as I shoved him down upon the bed the wrong way round, feet to headboard.

“Oh-ho! That’s the spirit!” He grinned, pumping his hips as I slid my parts into the tight clasp of his muscular, tanned thighs.

He should have seemed ridiculous–trousers about his knees, shirt rucked up–but the feel of him overrode all such considerations. Hot, in the cold night; alive, amongst all the death; desirous of me. Of me. And I of him.

We moved that way for long moments, I revelling in the press of skin and the surge of spunk on my hand, until he again became impatient and wriggled into a position of blatant invitation.

“Come now, Dannyboy,” he said, “are you going to stuff me or aren’t you?” Positioning myself at his entrance, I obliged swiftly, enjoying rather too much the pained cry I muffled with one hand. He shoved it away forthwith to continue his commentary:

“Fuck, you’re a _savage_ all right. Tell me, does Pretty squeal when you have him? Bisque dolls like that always do.”

It was with fierce determination that I attempted to ignore his vulgarity, his stalwart refusal to abide by my terms, and most of all the orgasmic image his words conjured. While I applied myself solely to the base physiological practices uniting us in the moment, though, somehow the sybaritic beast sensed a truth in my disquiet.

“You haven’t–” he laughed, bell-like and pleasing as the rest of him. “You’ve never! By God, man, ten years and you haven’t so much as–” His voice turned crafty, then, avaricious on top of the mocking. “Maybe he needs a _rea_ _l_ man to take him in hand, show him what he’s good for. D’you think he’d mind if I just–”

I averted my face and grasped him by the hair. A scalpel might have been thought more poetic, given my profession, but all surgeons were barbers once. My straight razor parted the smooth skin of his throat, split artery, tendon, muscle and cartilage before snagging on sturdy bone. I could only imagine the delicious expression of shock which no doubt accompanied his guttural attempt at vocalisation.

When I twisted him round to look into dimming eyes, the face that met mine seemed somehow a surprise: coarser, stupider than that I’d held in my mind when doing the deed. Conflating the God with the sacrifice.

“I’ve done, and will do, things of which you dare not dream, _Eric_.” His blood slicked my fingers, his shirt, the tattered throwaway sheets I’d so carefully tucked over an oilcloth in preparation. “It should come as some consolation that Herbert might actually want your body now.”

As, truthfully, did I still–his death throes, on a purely sensory level, inflamed my loins, and the thought of my partner’s reaction to so perfect a specimen intensified the same. Yet I was resolved that my satisfaction would not be Clapham-Lee’s; with some difficulty, I removed that still-twitching corpus from about me, and toweled his many fluids away.

~*~*~*~*~

There is a trick to walking a dead man. One must take on enough of his weight to keep him upright, while giving the impression that his feet touch the ground and he is at least making some effort at verticality if not locomotion. It is a skill I’ve had many occasions to practice since the first, when my arm pressed warmly parallel to my friend’s across the broad back of the object that would ultimately, through our joint efforts, become the notorious and repulsive inmate of Sefton Asylum.

A fluttering holly-red scarf, a greatcoat, and a chorus of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” over a general air of Christmas jollity hid a great many other sins as I tramped along the snow-muddied path between our quarters and the building in which we’d claimed space for our researches.

Three had held keys to the laboratory; I used Clapham-Lee’s, which he’d carelessly shoved into the pocket of his coat as though it was not the way into the most valuable secret on that hideous Front.

“Herbert.”

He was perched at a table as I’d known he’d be, studying past midnight by the weak flame of a single ancient lamp. The air was thick with smoke, his spectacles reflecting as red pinpricks the cherry of his latest cigarette in the gloom.

“What, Cain?” He huffed in longsuffering irritation, rustled his papers and shoved one notebook closer to the safe. The perfunctory twitch of his head indicated that he’d noted the intrusion, but little else, so great was his absorption. “As we’ve no work at present, I’m afraid that I’ve no need for you or the Major–”

I released my grip on the man of the hour, sending him slumping down my side to plant on the floor with a soft _whump_. At the familiar noise, Herbert’s attention was at last roused in full from his theories, safety pen dropping to the desk and cigarette flung into a cup of weak tea long gone cold.

“What on Earth–” He flew forward like some uncanny bird; formerly I would have seen a falcon, but now I thought him perhaps better a raven, stalking battle’s unfortunates at the Morrigan’s side.

“He’s dead.”

“I see that, but how– Did he attack you?” One lovely hand traveled rapidly over my limbs. Assurance, diagnosis, affirmation of my continued health.

“We disagreed,” I began, feeling but a small twinge at the not-really-prevarication. “He was drunk–”

“Drunk? Pity, that.” Fair brows beetled in dismay behind golden frames, and I cursed myself for the error. “But it’s not the first time we’ve had to account for intoxicants in the blood. Always a unique challenge. Of course, if he was mad, perhaps the brain is not–”

“Sane,” I hastened to assure him, “Just–misguided.”

“Hmm. We’ll see, I suppose.” He nudged the body with his toe, measuring its pliability with the ease of long practice. “I’ve been meaning to test something anyway, when it comes to heads. But whatever did you have to quarrel over?” God forbid he should find out. His hand, his beautiful surgeon’s hand, remained on my arm, traveling up and down from elbow to jaw and back in an absent soothing gesture that bespoke concern and comfort.

“A mere difference of opinion.” I swallowed hard. “I’m afraid he became rather forceful in asserting his views on a matter without being in full possession of the facts, and the drink… I thought I should bring him here, rather than risk a report.”

“You thought right.” Usually West seemed beautiful and terrible and remote in the way of some ancient idol, but just then delight rendered him almost childlike. Singlemindedly rapturous was the focus on his face as he knelt and examined our fallen associate; his keen gaze and precise probing of the gaping linear wound beneath the scarlet covering fed queerly my own still-burning flames. “Quickly, Cain!” He clapped his lilywhite hands twice, setting free a fine sanguine spray to speckle his cheeks and glasses. “To the table, before he cools any further!”

Shaking my head, I bent to the task of once again lifting and shifting dead weight with some difficulty due to my still-excited state. We had the former Major upon the slab in moments, soon to be properly unwrapped and subjected to whatever fancies West’s fevered brain might have concocted in that dread period of inactivity. My only duty now was to assist.

“Oh, Daniel?” I expected some admonishment, or a request for equipment not at hand, but instead pale unshielded eyes sparkled with riotous good humor above a fond smile.

“Yes?” I managed, breathless once again at this drawing-aside of his fey glamour.

“ _Thank_ you, my dear.” In his delirium, he twirled me about like the whirlwind he was and pressed a kiss to each of my cheeks in the chaste Gallic fashion. “You are the best of assistants.”

And then, with a soft, bloody touch that prompted a soft gasp, he ensured my libido’s troubles were at last eased.

“Merry Christmas, pet.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> The Hidden Working Title of this was ‘Stupid Sexy Flanders’, for those of you who like truly appalling puns that reference both the Great War and The Simpsons.


End file.
